By Victor Greto
Domestic and romantic comedies are cute, funny, sweet. And they all seem to work out in the end.
Well, not necessarily, if you were a woman 200 years ago ensconced in the upper crust of England and in desperate search for a gentleman.
Back then, you legally belonged to your father, until you were released to another man, preferably one who had money. If not, you were lost, perhaps doomed to spinsterhood. So, imagine if you were one of five sisters, at least one of whom (Jane) was gorgeous, the next one (Elizabeth) not bad looking and very intelligent, and the others – well, not so good looking or smart. What to do?
No wonder Mrs. Bennet seems so ditzy.
It’s the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, and its popularity has only increased over the 20 decades since she finished her book in a frenzy of writing – radically revising a novel she had written more than a decade before.
“It’s a novel about integrity,” says Siobhan Maria Carroll, assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware.
“A lot of people get hung up in the romance of it, but the book is about people who are in difficult circumstances and under a lot of social pressure. Elizabeth has to marry for money, so what she struggles with is the way to ensure a future without sacrificing who she is as a person, and that is what has kept the novel alive.”
It’s also a novel about the search for the self, says author Anna Quindlen in her Modern Library introduction to Pride and Prejudice. “And it is the first great novel to teach us that that search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.”
If there’s one thing that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is about, it’s about the terror of being a young woman in upper-class England at the turn of the 19th century and her desperate need to marry well.
“It’s about a struggle of an intelligent person to get by in a society that wants her to make great compromises,” Carroll says. “We know how hard it is for a woman in that society, and it makes Austen one of the most interesting writers out there.”
Most of Austen’s novels deal with personal choice, says Elizabeth Jane Steele, vice president of conferences for the Jane Austen Society of North America. “Nowadays women have many more choices than they did back then. It’s a journey of discovery. Every heroine learns more about herself than about everyone else.
The “pride” and “prejudice” of the title seem to apply to both Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, and Mr. Darcy, the hero, both of whom prejudges the other, and both of whom fall in love and marry.
“We like Liz so much we overlook her shortcomings,” Steele says. “She’s too quick to judge. And the genius of Austen is that she makes fully rounded characters and, in spite of their flaws, you like them anyway.”
The popularity of Austen’s novels and their many film and TV adaptations speak to the intricate and sophisticated world she recreated, says Dr. Jeffrey Gibson, associate professor of English at Wesley College.
“What’s useful about it is they give us a portrait of domestic life among the minor gentry in England who were becoming the middle class, a portrait of the appropriate way, through satire and irony, for young men and women to interact with each other in polite society.”
In terms of the future, one can see her anticipating our culture’s (or Hollywood’s) love for romantic comedies, the need to wrap it all up by tying the knot.
“In the end,” Gibson says, “they have to concede some of their individualism and stubbornness and create a family union, just like the classic comedies in Shakespeare, and marriage is the ultimate symbol of social stability.”
The popularity of Austen also coincides with the growth of the so-called “chick-lit” movement in contemporary literature, for which Austen serves as a literary role model, Gibson says.
“As in Austen’s novels, ‘chick-lit’ often features female protagonists who are the intellectual equals of their male counterparts but who must nevertheless struggle to negotiate the complex gender politics of their time,” he says.
Perhaps the best way to end an article on Jane Austen is to quote its first line, one of the most famous in British literature: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
“The opening is one of the best opening lines from that era,” Carroll says. “It captures Austen’s style.”
It’s a style full of irony. In her society 200 years ago, it was, of course, the woman, under intense social pressure, who was in desperate need of a husband.
“People are judging them all the time because they’re only going to be seen by men in short windows of time to see how beautiful, witty and intelligent and moral they are,” Carroll says. “Austen is aware of social performances and is delighted to watch them with us, with a subtle running commentary on it.”